Streaming game service OnLive has begun taking orders for its home console, with shipments beginning on December 2.

The hardware package will retail for $99 in the US and consists of the Micro Console TV adaptor, one free game, the OnLive Wireless Controller and related cables.

OnLive claims that initial set up takes around three minutes, with games up and running on HDTV's within seconds.

The Micro Console is 1080p and 3D TV compatible, and supports up to four controllers and Bluetooth or USB headsets for in-game voice chat. The controller itself has variable rumble settings and a Brag Clip button to capture game footage.

If users already have access to OnLive on their PC or Mac, games can also be played via the Micro Console.

The company has also said it will offer a flat-rate fee for unlimited access to its library of games, as well as 3-day and 5-day rentals, with actual price details to come.

"This is a big day for OnLive. It's the culmination of more than eight years of hard work by many people, both at OnLive and at our partners, to realise a dream that so many people said was impossible," commented Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive.

"My hat's off to the team for their dedication and sacrifice to reach this incredible achievement. It has been an honour to work with everyone who made this dream a reality.

Major publishers including Take-Two, Square Enix, Codemasters and Ubisoft already offer their games via the service.

OnLive reviewDigital service does not deliver true HD and its games catalogue is too small

It works. That’s the most impressive part about OnLive’s cloud-based games service. You can sample, rent, and purchase games on-demand. The best part: you won’t need an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or an expensive gaming PC. You won’t even need a disc or time to download and install titles. All the work is done by OnLive’s data centers, which stream the game you’re playing directly to your TV or monitor via your broadband internet connection.

The service has been available via www.OnLive.com since June, 2010. But OnLive game system kits are now available to pre-order and are scheduled to ship on December 2. So, we decided to look at what’s in the box, and find out if the new tech is worth your while.

Downloaded the free membership and I'm not impressed. It looks like I'm looking through a window first, second of all on Kane and Lynch the screen tearing is dreadful. I'll keep an eye on it because it's a good concept.

once they release a flat rate number then i'll pay attention... but i still don't think this is for me... nor do i think a yearly membership would be cheap either... i am thinking upwards of $200/yr...

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QUOTE (Massacre @ Mar 15 2011, 01:24 AM)

Oh, good one. The "you're on the internet so you must have no life" insult isn't moronic or unoriginal at all. You must, without a doubt, be a very important member of society, not at all a waste of the already barely valuable gift of life.

As is the case for everyone who takes issue with people who make them sad on the internet, you are one of two kinds of people:

You are exactly what you claim I am, and that is a lonely, pathetic basement dweller. You life is spent eating eight pounds of junk food per day, masturbating to anything you find online that's even remotely feminine, and wishing you had good looks and social skills. You continue to live with your mother until she dies of a combination of lung cancer and liver failure brought on by the chain-smoking and heavy drinking she used to cope with what a failure you are. Your mother mercifully dead and free of the living embodiment of failure she regretfully thrust from her loins, the bills start to pile up and you, unemployed and unable to pay these bills (of course), lose the house and everything in it. Somehow even more of a failure than you already were, you wander from place to place eating out of dumpsters and sleeping in your own filth until you finally die of AIDS, which you contracted from a diseased whore you scrounged up enough money to pay for, so you could finally lose your virginity while at the same time pretending that your mother was back in your life.

Or:

You are the type who was an athlete in high school, who was genetically doomed to be an idiot but managed to finish school and even get a college scholarship because you were so good at a worthless children's game. You went off to college with a suitcase full of polo shirts and condoms, the polo shirts, because you're a douche, and the condoms to prevent you from impregnating the dim-witted young college girls whom you could never touch without the aid of Rohypnol, a drug you refer to as "roofies" because you can neither spell or pronounce Rohypnol. You scrape by with borderline D's for the next four years, and leave the campus to go out into the real world where your realize you're not intelligent or talented enough to do anything of value with your life. Misery and minimum wage ensues for thirty years, then you blow your brains out, and your corpse, alone and forgotten, is not discovered until the smell of rotting flesh seeps under your door and your bodily fluids finally soak through the floor of your studio apartment and into the room below you. Your body is cremated, the ashes scraped into a garbage bin because there was no one in your life who valued you enough to pay for a casket, funeral, or burial plot.

You're undoubtedly one of the two, otherwise you would have better things to do than complain about the theme of a forum that doesn't care about anything you have to say.

Until we start seeing adverts all over the TV I don't think many people will take much notice. I'm not that interested at the moment myself, it seems to be trying to change the way we play games and for me, it's always been via a console you stick your game in. I don't want to change my habits.

Call me old school, but I'd rather have a gaming collection I can touch - not one that is stored electronically somewhere. I can't imagine games being much cheaper on On Live than they are on disc. Also, will there be new releases that coincide with the disc's release? Most of the games I saw on the commercial for this were all games that are recent but in the gaming marketplace, they are old news.

Also, I trade a lot of my games. I don't think you can do this with On Live, I know you can rent games, but this whole system takes away the tangibility of owning games.